Live in the place where you live

Wherever you live, if you are not a part of a trusting community of people you don't really live there. You live in your own little world.

This is something that I've learned here in Uganda, where wealth differentials, culture disparities, and language barriers make trust a hard thing to build. But if I don't trust people here and invest in them and let them invest in me, then I'm not really here. I'm just passing through this place, like a breeze: inconsequential, quickly forgotten.

The same goes in America. You exist where you build trusting community. That's why, in a culture where most people don't talk to their neighbors, people's worlds have shrunken to their immediate families, their houses, perhaps their offices.

If we are going to make our communities better, we have to start by really living in them, building relationships based on trust, developing understanding. The larger you want the impact to be the more barriers you'll have to trust across - socioeconomic, geographic, ethinic.

But you might want to start with your next door neighbor.